Teams from the University of Toronto, the University of British Columbia, as well as the Université De Sherbrooke and INRS Eau Terre Environnement Research Centre won US$250,000 prizes. The award program is part of the US$100-million global XPrize Carbon Removal competition. (The Logic)

Talking point: The four-year program is funded by Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation, and aims to find solutions to remove carbon dioxide and reduce the impact of climate change. E-quester, developed at the University of Toronto, is among 23 student-led teams around the world that won the combined US$5-million prize. The technology captures CO2 directly from the atmosphere. “The really innovative part of our project is that we only use electricity in this process, so we can be entirely renewable-powered,” said industrial-engineering PhD candidate Celine Xiao, who co-led the team with master’s student Shijie Liu, in an interview with The Logic. Xiao said the team’s next goal is storing the extracted CO2. The award money will be used to continue to advance E-quester’s electrochemical process.